PUNE: The Pune city police have filed another supplementary charge sheet in the chain of cybercrime fraud in which a total of Rs 94 crore were siphoned off from Cosmos Bank last year.
A Special Investigation Team (SIT) which includes cybercrime officials and experts from various fields has been formed to probe the case and a total of 18 accused have been arrested till now.
The 400-page charge sheet has been filed against five arrested accused Salman Naeem Baig (31), Shahbaz Farooq Shaikh (29), Shahbaz Arif Khatri (30), Asif Jamil Sheikh (31) of Thane and Feroz Yasin Shaikh (37) of Mumbai. All the accused are currently in judicial custody. Police officials said the accused had withdrawn Rs 61 lakh from ATMs in Jaipur and Indore.
DCP (Cyber Crime) Sambhaji Kadam said, “We have filed the third (supplementary) charge sheet in the Cosmos Bank heist case against the five accused. Further investigation is going on.”
According to the police, in one of the biggest cyber attacks on an Indian bank, several cloned debit cards of the Cosmos Bank were used for thousands of ATM transactions from India and 28 other countries in a period of seven hours on August 11 last year. While around Rs 78 crore was withdrawn in more than 12,000 ATM transactions outside India, another 2,800 transactions were made in different places within India, of Rs 2.5 crore. Further, on August 13, 2018, more Rs 13.5 crore were transferred to a Hong Kong-based entity using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunications (SWIFT) facility. The transactions outside India were done through VISA cards, those in India were done through the Rupay cards, probe had revealed. In all, Rs 94 crore was siphoned off.
The first charge-sheet in the case was filed in December last year. The masterminds, who are yet to be identified, used modus operandi of using several people as mules to carry out multiple withdrawals in return for a commission. The international cyber criminals who stole the Cosmos Bank data by infiltrating its system sold the data further down the chain over the dark net. This data was further used in individual countries to make cloned cards. These cards were further passed on to mules for withdrawal, the charge sheet has said.
